Build as many backlinks as possible. The aim is to end up with many thousands.

The backlink sites will have as high PR as possible e.g. 5,6,7

It's generally accepted that this strategy will result in a sandbox effect (spike in serp placement, followed by a severe serp drop). The aim here is to force your way out of the sandbox and back to the top by the sheer number and power of the backlinks you build. Hypothetically speaking, what would happen if you got hundreds of PR6 and PR7 backlinks in this scenario - might it overcome the sandbox effect?

Workload: 1 hour per day for heavy spamming

Strategy 2: Slow Related Build

Build backlinks more slowly on a set time schedule, in an attempt to pass under the google sandbox filter.

The backlink sites will be high PR, and on-topic

This is working under the (unproven) assumption that google will value/devalue a link based on the topic relevancy - it is not clear if this is the case or not, as some webmasters attest to ranking well using non-related backlinks.

Workload: 30 mins per day for searching for suitable backlink sites which are on-topic. The rate of backlink accrual is vastly reduced.

A linkwheel creates a barrier between the spam links and the central site. The central site will gain link juice more slowly + in a diluted fashion, but it will supposedly be protected from the sandbox effect.

The drawback...

Workload: 8 solid hours to make quality original content for a 24 spoke linkwheel and set it all up (let's be realistic here).

Which of these strategies are you using? Do you have experience using these link building strategies, or any others?

IMO that's not really competitive, so based on there's only 200k result's, it would certainly raise an eyebrow if your getting a lot of back links quickly, unless 90% of the phrase are targeting the exact phrase, basically look at the amount of back links for the top sites ranking for the term (it's a shame PR isn't update for frequently, as it would be a nice metric to use), if it's a lot (depends on what you define as 'a lot) then feel free to build more per day, the main key is consistency and depending on the nature of the site (if new content is added frequently for example) then increase the number per day, as it only natural it will acquire more over time.

Personally, I usually go for 'Medium' I don't mass brute force, but I don't build them slowly either.

Well, when I pick a niche I go for really low comp, and try to stay below even 50,000. But maybe I'm being too conservative?

Click to expand...

Well if your making money, then there isn't a problem with it, for example you could be targeted long-tail product names which are giving you a few leads per week, it only takes you a minute to throw a site up, and with the low competition, you rank quickly with very little effort, so it's certainly a logical and safe strategy as you can repeat this process several times a week.

Personally I got sold my sites a while ago, and used all the money for content, I'm currently only working on promotion for 1 large site (over 1k unique content pages) and there's quite a lot of competition for almost every single page lol, but I like a challenge.

Anyway I've seen your post, and you're more competent than most, I'd recommend you go for it, I don't think you would have any problems tbh.

I'm actually testing each one of these 3 strategies, and taking detailed information as I go. They all seem to carry quite a lot of risk, days of work put in and then google makes it disappear with just a slap of the hand.

I'm actually testing each one of these 3 strategies, and taking detailed information as I go. They all seem to carry quite a lot of risk, days of work put in and then google makes it disappear with just a slap of the hand.

I'm new to SEO and you're right about sandbox effect on bruteforce method, 2 of my new domain was sandboxed with heavy backlinking using BMD and rssbot...it give sudden spike of organic trafic and positioned on google 1st page for a week and then gone...
Is there any quickest way to get out of sandbox?

I'll try to use 2 other method you explained here...hope it'll work better...

Just to update, using an indirect link build is working well for me right now. It seems linkwheels are where its at - although you dont need to "close the wheel" as it were, just have the slave sites link to the money site.

Would there not be some value in adding some lower PR links as well? Sure, they may not help with rankings as much, but at the same time, it would make your link profile look a little more natural as the "average Joe website owner" probably wouldn't be smart enough to target only high PR links.

Think about sites (or pages) that "go viral" - they may suddenly get hundreds or thousands of links in a few days, but they don't get "slapped".

This has been said often, but if sites could be banned for excessive link-building, then we'd all be doing it to our competitors. My guess is that heavy link-building (or unusual patterns in link-building, like lots of guestbooks) might attract a human-review from G and that may be when some sites get banned

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